Caelan POV:
We don’t move as one. That choice is deliberate from the beginning, based on understanding that power shown too obviously at the wrong moment becomes a story before it ever becomes an argument. Stories, once handed to other wolves, rarely remain your own for long no matter how carefully you intended them to be understood.
If we arrive together, unmistakably strong, then no matter what words leave our mouths afterward, the meeting becomes something else before it has even begun. It becomes pressure, it becomes a test of whether surrounding packs will bend toward us or away from us, and that is not what this moment is meant to be.
This must remain a choice. It’s not a moment just in truth, but in appearance.
Because wolves are governed by perception, by what something looks
